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Dude... thanks for the link, but it's better if others can click on it:

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tzer-jen/zbochs/.

Oh, the laziness ;-)

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

I just attended the trial here at Beckman Auditorium.

The Judge ruled as follows:
Motion to dismiss charges against Caltech - granted under institutional provision of DMCA.
Motions to dismiss charges against David Baltimore, "Prof Law", and "John Johnson" denied.

Thanks to Hon. Judge Lew, Seth Schoen of the EFF, and Brad Hunt of the MPA for helping with this trial.

My very rough trial notes are available here (with biased non-lawyer view showing through)

There will probably be a followup trial next year, as this was just the motion to dismiss.

Mine had been grading their Lisp submissions via script when I took a particular class in 2000. One of the assignments was to implement the Davis-Putnam algorithm for testing satisfiability of CNF expressions. The year I took it, they added a style portion to the grade so TAs had to actually look at the submissions. Someone the previous year had defined his davis-putnam function to always return true. Since 87 percent of the test cases were supposed to be satisfiable, he got a B on the assignment.

No, sorry. There is a limit to how far we'll ever to able to see, and it's called our "light cone".

John Barrow's book "Impossibility" has a nice description of this (and other limits).

...and then there is the reverse- Caltech awards no BA degree. It is possible (albeit rare) to earn a BS in Literature. To do so, of course, you'd have to take the core curriculum requirement of six course-years worth of math and physical science.

/*disclaimer: I went to CalTech, and took a class from this guy as a freshman */

Did any of you take physics in high school? I did. At least once a week, part of our class would consist of a viewing of the venerable Mechanical Universe series of videotapes, hosted by none other than Dr. David Goodstein.

By far, the most famous and exciting episode is the one where he shoots the stuffed monkey as it's falling from across the room with a rubber dart fired from one of those toy guns. The pinnacle of my freshman year at CalTech (well, apart from the trip to Tijuana... and those little blotters with the all-seeing eye on them...) OK OK, the school-sanctioned educational pinnacle was seeing Dr. Goodstein REPEAT the demo from the tape in real life, in front of a live audience. People acutally APPLAUDED when the dart hit the monkey. That's when I knew that even though I was doomed to be a nerd forever... there were other people even nerdier than me.

Exactly ... this is one of the recommendations of the MIT-Caltech Voting Technology project, available here .

There's a well known intro paper on wavelets here: Building your own wavelets at home (Wim Sweldens and Peter Schröder, ACM SIGGRAPH 1996)

More here.

images.google.com served up this:

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~zoe/zoe_grad1.jpg

http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/zoe-poppy-sm.jpg

Is a course being offered at caltech since last summer on using gpus for numerical work. Course page is here.

The fact that "electronic" votes can't be audited or recounted is another "feature."

Not true. Electronic votes can be audited - if the machines are designed properly (which, currently, they're not).

The fact that "electronic" votes can't be audited or recounted is another "feature."

Not true. Electronic votes can be audited - if the machines are designed properly (which, currently, they're not).

E-Voting isn't the problem. It's possible the have secure, verifiable, and recountable e-voting machines. Most people are simply ignorant of that fact. The problem is that the e-voting machines currently in use are not designed to support verifiability or meaningful recounts. The mass hysteria whipped up this past year has most people (including a lot of techies) misunderstanding the problem.

You may want to ask voters with disabilities what they think, then ask Caltech and MIT what they have to say on the topic, then investigate other options. Just a suggestion.

The Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project has done some work in the area of creating secure electronic voting machines for polling places.

The Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project has done some work in the area of creating secure electronic voting machines for polling places.

Twirlip posts from the net of a million lies

• Ma 2 ab. Probability, Statistics, and Differential Equations. What happened to calculus and all that? I took it in high school...
• Ma 5 abc. Introduction to Abstract Algebra. You want to really understand the essence of object oriented design?
• Ma/CS 6 abc. Introduction to Discrete Mathematics.
• Ma 7. Number Theory for Beginners
• Ma 108 abc. Classical Analysis.
• Ma 109 abc. Introduction to Geometry and Topology.
• Ma 112 ab. Statistics.
• Ma 116 abc. Mathematical Logic and Axiomatic Set Theory.
• Ma/CS 117 abc. Computability Theory
• Ma 121 abc. Combinatorial Analysis.
• Ma 160 abc. Number Theory.

Unfortunately, there's absolutely no way to move heat from anywhere to a warmer place.

Using the Peltier effect you can. By connecting a high conducting material and a low conducting material to a battery, the high conducting material becomes cold, without even getting hot. The heat transfers to the low conducting material regardless of the ambiant temprature.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jsnyder/thermoelectric s/history_page.htm
http://www.quasarelectronics.com/3066.htm

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

I am a Catholic with an interest in science. I trust the Church, and I trust science. It's true that proof of life on other worlds might throw some Christians into confusion, or make them retreat (further) into denial of legitimate science. But personally, I think it disrespectful to the Creator when we are afraid of looking too closely at the method of creation, for fear of contradicting Scripture. This is not a new idea: "If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly." - St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) Another Augustine quote Faith and Science

BTW, his site has more information on Sedna.

We can think of 4 possibilities for why we do not see a moon around Sedna.

• (1) Perhaps we got extremely unlucky and the moon is hiding directly behind Sedna. This possibility is unlikely (about 1 in 100 chance), but can't be ruled out completely.
• (2) Perhaps the moon is fainter than expected. We think that the moon has to be quite large to explain the very slow rotation of Sedna, so we think that it should be bright. But it is possible that it is large but has a very dark surface and so is difficult to see. We believe that many objects (other than Sedna!) in the outer reaches of the solar system should be quite dark, so perhaps this suggestion is not unreasonable.
• (3) Perhaps the moon is gone! It is possible that there once was a moon which slowed the rotation of Sedna but now the moon is gone. Moons can get destroyed by impacts with other large objects in space or they can be stripped away by close encounters with other planetoids. While we can't rule out this possibility, we do not think it is very likely.
• (4) Perhaps our circumstantial evidence is misleading us. There are 2 ways that we can think of for this to have happened: Perhaps the brightening and faintening that we think we see are not real. Measurements in science are never perfect, and perhaps some of these imperfections have, by bad luck, led us to believe that we are measuring Sedna's rotation when we are really not. From our understanding of the measurements, we can estimate that there is about a 1 in 20 chance of this type of bad luck. We thus think it is unlikely, but, again, we can't rule it out. Perhaps the measurement is real, but we are being fooled. Imagine that you look at a clock once every twenty-five hours. How fast would you think the hands were turning? The first day the clock would say noon. The second day 1pm. The third day 2pm. You might think the clock only moved 1 hour per twenty-five hours. Perhaps the same thing is happening with Sedna: Our measurements were made approximately every 24 hours, so if Sedna rotates every 25 hours, then every time we look it appears to have only rotated a little, and we think it takes 24 days to make a full rotation. This possibility cannot be ruled out with the current data, though it would require the unusual coincidence that Sedna's rotation period would have to be unusually close to the earth's rotation period!

Servers were down much of last week. The ITS website has a few brief details.

Chess is also an interesting test case for one of Vinge's paths to superhuman intelligence. Namely, the idea that human/machine interfaces may become so intimate that we will in effect fuse with our technology, becoming superhuman in capability.

Kasparov, for example, has been advocating allowing mixed human/computer teams in "Advanced Chess" tournaments. It seems that the human/machine combination, with the right interface, yields far better chess play than either alone.

Some questions that fascinate me:

• What is the ideal human/computer interface in chess to maximize play strength?
• What are some other tasks or games where the combined human/computer would be much more effective than either alone?

Frankly I find these more useful questions than the old human vs. computer debate.

Verner Vinge wrote of the "Group Mind" in 1993 as a path to Sigularity see http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html. The free posting of the advances in knowlege is an accelerant to Singularity. If one buys into the Extopian worldview, then the debate takes on some profound implications.

People interested in computer voting systems should read the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project's reports.

This site has an interesting definition of "planet".

any body in the solar system that is more massive than the total mass of all of the other bodies in a similar orbit.

This would, however, demote Pluto...

Good definition here.

A planetoid is a gravity-rounded body.
A planet is a planetoid more massive than everything else, taken together, in a similar orbit.

By these definitions, Pluto and Sedna are not planets, just planetoids.

I've never seen why we'd want to call Pluto a planet. The rocky inner planets we can build on and walk around on, the gas giants might well be tapped for fusion fuel and populated with many orbiting colonies, but Pluto, Sedna, and similar large asteroids and comets are only interesting as collections of raw materials.

I like this planetary definition. As you may have guessed, my private definition is, "Place big enough to consider living on, not orbiting a planet itself." but this one seems good enough to me.

The flipside is that you can have problems when the same donor wants to give multiple buildings. My alma mater has no fewer than 4 buildings donated by and named after Arnold Beckman scattered across campus. It gets annoying when you have to call them "The Beckman Institute", "Beckman Auditorium", "Beckman Behavioral Biology", or whatever rather than just "Beckman". Not to mention how confusing it gets when you have multiple donors with similar names, like Spaulding and Spalding.

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If you're going to ask for the 10th planet(oid), I assume you mean Sedna. But if you're going to include Sedna, you really shouldn't forget Quaoar. It's too small to be considered a planet, but so is Sedna.

[edited repost from yesterday]

An MIT/Caltech study of voting technology found that paper ballots are the most accurate.

The 2004 Democratic primary had a turnout pattern of primary-specific apathy (lower than expected votes) and caucus-specific inspiration (high and record high votes). Why did the New York primary record a 20-year low turnout on the same day that the Minnesota caucus recorded a 33-year high turnout?

We could start with the 16-year old exchange student from Thailand (who cares about 18-year minimum age U.S. citizens) or a Feb 22 blueprint for process tampering ("... DFL is essentially conducting a primary at the caucuses. and through ineptness or design they've opened the door to more voting fraud than the Florida Republicans could ever imagine ..."). DFL will not provide official results until Mar 29th, nearly 4 weeks after the MN caucus.

South Carolina's state Dem party fought pressure from the national Dems to institute a loyalty oath for voters, which would have torpedoed Edwards. State officials chose to hand count paper ballots for security, even though machines were available. South Carolina was one of the few 2004 primaries to report record turnout and the only state where Edwards won.

Hand counted paper ballots are the gold standard of voting. Cheaper and faster are neither necessary nor desirable properties of biennial elections. The elimination of counting as a fraud source allows more resources to be deployed for voter authentication and registration (age, citizenship and proof of precinct residency).

Vulnerable processes are easily attacked by malicious precinct captains who plausibly deny competence. Don't let humans hide behind distracting machines. Securely log poll officials and reduce the cost of distributed auditing.

An MIT/Caltech study of voting technology found that paper ballots are the most accurate.

The 2004 Democratic primary had a turnout pattern of primary-specific apathy (lower than expected votes) and caucus-specific inspiration (high and record high votes). Why did the New York primary record a 20-year low turnout on the same day that the Minnesota caucus recorded a 33-year high turnout?

South Carolina's state Dem party fought pressure from the national Dems to institute a loyalty oath for voters, which would have torpedoed Edwards. State officials chose to hand count paper ballots for security, even though machines were available. South Carolina was one of the few 2004 primaries to report record turnout and the only state where Edwards won.

Hand counted paper ballots are the gold standard of voting. Cheaper and faster are neither necessary nor desirable properties of biennial elections.

I've been writing for wikipedia about TNOs, and so I've checked links to articles at CNN, WashPost, BBC, etc.. The commercial news companies get so much wrong it's scary.

In the article you linked to at Nature.com it says "The Spitzer telescope has spied Sedna." and "The Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes later confirmed the find.". Co-discover Mike Brown however, clearly states that they "used the 30 meter diameter IRAM telscope, and in collaboration with John Stansberry at the University of Arizona and Bill Reach at the Spitzer Science Certer, we used the Spitzer Space Telescope. Sedna was too small to be detected in either."

Avoid the corporate media and go to the source, or lacking that know that the news companies exist to make money - not to report the facts.

Ok, the article (especially the "6000x faster than DSL") doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's my take on it: they're talking about a new congestion avoidance mechanism.

Here's a super-simplified version of the problem they're trying to solve: Imagine you have a 3Mbps link to your ISP, as do 49 of your neighbors. However, your ISP has a 45Mbps T3 link to the outside internet. What happens when everybody on your ISP trys to download the Half-Life 2 demo at the same time, creating a need for for 150 Mbps at the ISP uplink? This is called congestion.

There are various solutions that you can use for congestion avoidance; you may have heard of TCP Vegas and Reno (I'm linking to the PDF document, because it contains a lot of math. This should also be a signal to you about how ridiculously siplified my explanation above is). Obviously, when there is congestion, somebody's got to wait, but determining who and how is not as easy as it might seem.

The new part of the problem is: today's fast networks have very different bandwidth and latency ratios to the networks of even five years ago. Vegas and Reno congestion avoidance algorithms don't work as well as they used to under these conditions. This paper presents a solution that does work well on today's high-speed networks. (Maybe somebody with more expertise could pipe in here with a discussion of "why the existing mechanisms don't work well, and how the new solutions address the problem"?)

I believe slashdot has already covered FAST, which I believe is a different solution to the same problems.

...From the telecon are up here: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2 004-05/telecon/

Could this thing be 2004 DW (it's a recent discovery by Mike Brown, the Caltech guy mentioned in the article)? If so, you can find a real picture here.

At the time that page was typed up, they weren't thinking of it as a planet.

This reminds me of Quaoar.

Both are small Kuiper Belt objects. Quaoar was mentioned on Slashdot before.

It's nice to find these mini-planets and give them names. The area beyond Pluto is fascinating, all the more reason why the New Horizons probe should be launched. I hope that Bush's single-minded fixation on Mars doesn't cause this project to be scrapped....

Holy cow, nobody has yet even mentioned 2004-DW as a candidate for Sedna nor posted any links. Here ya go:

story 1
story 2
story 3
website of researcher at CalTech

The diameter (up to 1880 km) of 2004-DW matches pretty nicely with the upper estimate of 2000km of Sedna. These reports find 2004-DW to comparible in size to Quaoar. (Note these stories came out when the data was fresh, better numbers should be handed out Monday.)

Here's a very good .pdf slideshow that shows what type of terrain is on the course. I've driven off-road through the California desert many times, and it's pretty rugged stuff, lots of ravines, gullies, brush, and sand. Although one time I managed 40mph in an '83 Honda Accord. Not to mention that I had been up all night, was half-stoned, and had a car full of people tripping on LSD. Ah, those good old college days.

Holy crap! It's a Motoslave!

FYI,

from this IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Awards for Technological Innovation (1998) website,
http://www.ieeeits.org/society/goldjub_tech.htm

All three authors (Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima) got the award for their invention of turbo codes.

The first two are French professors who had already got mentioned in the article, the last one is Thai, at that time a PhD student at Ecole.

The original paper in the conference is this one

Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications, (Geneva, Switzerland), pp. 1064--1070, May 1993.
http://gladstone.systems.caltech.edu/EE/Courses/EE 127/EE127B/handout/berrou.pdf

for publications in Turbo Code, try this one

TURBO CODE BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://pilgrim.unl.edu/comlab/turbopage/tcb.html

The original paper is here

Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications, (Geneva, Switzerland), pp. 1064--1070, May 1993.
http://gladstone.systems.caltech.edu/EE/Courses/EE 127/EE127B/handout/berrou.pdf

(with 400 citations, as counted by CiteSeer ResearchIndex
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/31968/0
-- yeah, it is since 1993 .. not "new", but currently still a hot topic in telecomm.)

about the authors, the first two are French professors who had already mentioned in the article, the last one is Thai, at that time a PhD student at Ecole.

Attendance was about the same today except it didn't appear that there was as many media representatives present. Again temperatures were in the 90's. I acquired a media pass today and was allowed access to almost every area of the speedway including the pits and the start line. This will allow me to film each entry up close and interview members of the teams. DARPA is also publishing the daily events here and here.

Vehicle inspections on the rest of the field were performed today. DARPA is reacting as fast as they can to modify the rules and give every opportunity to each of the teams in hopes they will be able to qualify. DARPA is now allowing the teams as many appearances on the Q&D course as requested by the teams. The Q&D that was scheduled today became an opportunity for teams to iron out their problems on the track.

The Blue team with the CyberRider (the motorcycle entry Web Site) was the first on the Q&D course. It traveled about 20 feet when it fell over and exposed it's greasy side.

Team ENSCO Web Site traveled to the first major turn and failed to navigate the first sharp turn. This is also the same place Team TerraMax web site failed today and the Sci Autonics web site team.

The first turn appears to be difficult for the vehicles that make it there.

The ASI/Florida State Web Site had two more runs today. They disabled all of the perception systems and successfully ran about 1/3 of the course. The first run, the vehicle was driving like a "drunk sailor" according to a member of the team. Florida State took the recoded path data to tune their vehicle controller. ASI reported the vehicle tracked much better on the second run. I get the impression that a few more Q&D course test runs will be performed before the vehicle is ready to qualify.

Team Caltech Web Site made two more runs on the Q&D course. Well, both runs were consistent, but not as good as yesterday. Both times, cleared the start line and banked hard left as if it were going to the last way point. I hope to find out today what happened.

There were several other teams that attempted the Q&D course today with similar or worse results.

The highlight of the day was CMU's Red Team web site. As anticipated they made it to the finish line of the course and electrified the spectators and increased pressure to the rest of the field.

That's the highlights of the second day of Q&D testing.

The post is not entirely correct in that the image presented in the article is not the first image from Spitzer. The Images from Spitzer can be seen on CIT's Spitzer Space Telescope page. As you can see the first image was the 'aliveness test' image and the first scientifically useful image was that of the Dark Globule in IC 1396. Great images with links to the high-resolution versions.

The post is not entirely correct in that the image presented in the article is not the first image from Spitzer. The Images from Spitzer can be seen on CIT's Spitzer Space Telescope page. As you can see the first image was the 'aliveness test' image and the first scientifically useful image was that of the Dark Globule in IC 1396. Great images with links to the high-resolution versions.

"Just released" in this case means three months ago, of course.

And you can also go read the comments in the first Slashdot story released for this press release back in December.

Sure, there's a longer write-up, but the pictures weren't "just released".

I'm disappointed that there is not more information available about this event as it happens. I've been following it vicariously for months, and now I'd like to hear about what is happening at the speedway in Fontana. How many teams showed up? How many tried out today? Which passed, which failed? I haven't been able to find out any of that information.

The so-called Science Blog article was from February 10! That's not exactly timely, is it?

Nagle's later posting here does present some information about Caltech. The Caltech team web page provides the same basic info, with a little different spin. But I guess we're lucky they posted today; the previous entry on the team's news page was dated November 16, 2003.

CMU has been updating almost every day, but their last entry was Saturday, saying "The curtain goes up Monday morning". Again, what happened?

You'd think in this age of bloggers, when every windbag on the net sees fit to tell us what he had for lunch that day, someone would be watching this event and posting some updates in the evening. If this isn't happening, I beg anyone who is attending to step up and start writing! Maybe I'm spoiled by the usual instant access to information, but I'm passionately interested in this event and starving for news.